Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Ethical Leadership Amidst Disruptive Innovation

Technology in the modern era has surged to a point where disruptive innovation can change major foundational and structural processes that sustain businesses across the globe. As such, for a leader, envisioning without compromising on business ethics becomes a matter of prime importance, especially when we are talking about dealing with continuously-flowing information corpus to drive the success metrics of businesses. The question thus arises: In order to keep up with the opportunities and challenges that disruptive innovation brings in, are today's leaders taking enough care to keep their ethical responsibilities intact and in the forefront?

Case in point: Data-driven intelligence. While innovators see enough scope in this that benefits the civilisation in every aspect of life- personal and professional, regulators and law-makers worry that anonymity may face irreversible damages when user data gets tracked and leveraged to this scale for creating new business values. They also argue that the pace of disruptive technical advancement cannot be matched with the expected slow progress that legislative and regulatory bodies would make while developing the laws of governance and ethics around the same.

Disruptive innovation, backed by active investment, is gradually and rapidly enabling the growth of new-age digital ecosystems (Internet of Things, Cloud tech, AI, etc.) and as such, it lies in the hands of the leaders, who ultimately initiate and drive these changes, to be ethical and mindful of the cascading effects that a simple act of negligence can bring about, at a global level. Submitted as part of the Responsible Leadership course, Indian School of Business image credits: Milken Institute Review, seopressor.com